There are multiple musicals that inspired such deep passion within audiences that you would have expected them to be smash successes. Side Show, about conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, is one of those shows. The original 1997 production, which earned great reviews and received 4 Tony nominations including Best Musical, closed after 91 performances. The 2014 revival, directed by Bill Condon (the film Dreamgirls), earned 5 Tony nominations including Best Musical and closed after 56 performances. For book writer and lyricist Bill Russell those results didn’t match the passion of the audiences who saw each production.

On Monday, September 25th, Russell will present My Side of the Show at Birdland Jazz Club in New York. He’ll be joined by cast members from the show for an evening of stories and songs.

I got my own stories earlier this week when I spoke with Russell about this musical he wrote with Henry Krieger (Dreamgirls) that still holds a very important place in his heart. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To get even more stories about Side Show, please watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.

Q: How has your relationship to Side Show evolved since you first started working on it to where we are today? How will that influence how you present your memories from this chapter of your career?

It’s certainly been an education in a lot of ways – especially in how musicals get to Broadway. It has been on Broadway twice and it’s been a flop both times now. That’s a very loaded term, but I’m using the definition by Variety, which was considered the showbiz bible for a long time – I’m not sure if it still is. But they define a flop as any production which does not recoup its initial investment. And there are a lot of long-running shows that classify that way.

Jekyll and Hyde ran for four years on Broadway. Never recouped. Thoroughly Modern Millie won the Tony Award for Best Musical and it never recouped. I don’t think Sunset Boulevard did either. But, we live in a capitalist culture and it’s easier to measure success in terms of dollars and cents. But I don’t feel Side Show is a flop because it’s meant so much to so many people.

I looked at Vincent Canby‘s New York Times review of Side Show when it first opened on Broadway and he compared your work as a lyricist to the work of Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had had a production of On the Town going on in Central Park the summer prior to your opening. Since Side show was your first Broadway musical, not your first musical, but your first Broadway musical, what did that comparison mean to you?

Oh, God, it meant the world to me. To be mentioned in their company? I mean, they are just legendary and I loved their work. I met Betty Comden once and I mentioned that I can’t believe somebody would compare me with you. So that was a wonderful, wonderful moment for me. 

Vincent Canby’s review of the show was very, very positive, but most of it was a discourse about conjoined twins and it didn’t really help sell tickets. At that point I was wholly obsessed with that because we weren’t selling as well as the audience reaction seemed to have warranted. Every performance was getting instant standing ovations and people just were loving it. So I had very mixed emotions.

The musical opens with Come Look at the Freaks. It seems like as a society we have evolved into a people where that’s all we do. We just look at the freaks on Instagram, we look at them on Tik-tok, we look at them in every possible aspect of social media. When you wrote the lyrics for that song did you ever think that we, as a society, would embrace being and looking at the freaks as much as we have today?

No, not really. When I was first interviewed about the show in the mid-nineties they would ask, “What attracted you to this subject matter? Because sideshows don’t even exist anymore.” And I said, Are you kidding? They’ve moved to afternoon television because Jerry Springer was featuring conjoined twins regularly and much shorter people than them. I do think there’s just this fascination that is innate. It’s both fascination and repulsion about people who are radically different. But I do believe that we’ve become much more accepting. And now, as you say, we see freaks everywhere. I’m proud to own that world, by the way, because I definitely consider myself one. Certainly I did growing up. It’s a good point that they’re everywhere now.

There was a much more successful show that had the song Let Your Freak Flag Fly – Shrek the Musical. How has being a freak become more accepted if it’s going to be part of a popular musical like Shrek? 

In a way it has, but it still creates a barrier in terms of selling tickets. When the revival came about we thought that change you’re talking about and now is really the time for this. But women buy the most Broadway tickets. Though Side Show is very female-focused, I think when women hear it’s about conjoined twins they think it’s going to be sad and make them uncomfortable and they do not buy tickets. Once they see the show they love it. But getting them in just is a problem. It’s a continual marketing challenge.

You had to have known that when you started it.

When I was first pitched this idea I just was immediately interested. I thought the theatrical possibilities of two actors singing and moving together were great and the metaphorical ramifications were huge. Once I started diving into their story, I was just so fascinated. There was a point when [producer] Manny [Emmanuel] Azenberg, when we were doing readings of the show, came to me and said, “You realize, Bill, that this subject matter has a real ick factor connected with it.” And I was like, Really? I knew this wasn’t exactly standard Broadway fare, but I thought it was just intriguing and it never occurred to me it would be such a hard sell.

You have worked with composers Ronald Melrose, Janet Hood, Albert Evans, Peter Melnick. What sets your collaborations with Henry Krieger apart from all those other collaborators with whom you’ve worked? 

Henry, you know, he’s such a mensch. He’s just a great guy. He, like Irving Berlin and many other well-known composers, does not read music. So that was different. Our first meeting he asked me, “How do you prefer to write – music or lyrics first?” I was like, I go both ways as a lyricist, but oddly enough most of the composers I’ve worked with prefer the lyrics first. That’s far from typical with Henry.

In the morning I’ll work on a lyric, sometimes the whole lyric, but more likely an intro in a verse or a verse and a chorus. I take it down to him. He lives downtown, I live uptown. We will have discussed where it comes in the show, maybe a musical feel, but not always. He doesn’t read it first. He puts it on the piano, sits down, puts his hands on the keyboard, grabs it and looks up, and after a brief pause, starts singing and playing at the same time. I would say that 50% of the time what comes out of his fingers that moment defines what that song will ultimately be. 

As with any musical there are a lot of songs that never see the light of day or maybe are in early versions of the musical and then get taken out. Some of those from this musical were Why Haven’t You Learned Yet?, Side Show, The Choice I Made and more. How painful is it for you as a creator to have to say goodbye to something you put your heart and soul into?

When I started writing songs for musicals and we had to cut something, it was like, Oh, I can’t do that. But anymore it’s nothing to write another song. We frequently would write maybe five songs for the same moment in the show, just always refining it. Then we would cut stuff because the plot changed. It hasn’t been that hard. I will say when it came to the revival and working with Bill Condon, there were a couple songs that were really hard for me to lose, but I totally understood why.

Is there a whole alternate world of Side Show that exists in songs we’ve never heard? 

My husband Bruce put together a CD of songs we wrote and it’s 90 minutes long, and that by no means includes everything. When we first met with Bill Condon he asked for everything we’d written for the original production and he was mentioning songs we didn’t even remember writing. Honestly we’ve written so much stuff. It’s quite a bit of music and some really good stuff. 

You said writing songs is easy. You know how many people wish they could say that and mean it.

It’s easy for Henry and me, I have to say. Honestly, I could write lyrics every day. I have a much harder problem with books. I think they’re much harder, at least for me. But I love writing lyrics and you can finish them in a finite bit of time; unlike books, which never are finished. 

I saw an interview that you did with Henry, I think it was from Broadway.com. You mentioned that only one song remain untouched for the 2014 revival. What was that song and why? 

It was the the twins’ first song called Like Everyone Else and it wasn’t intentional that we didn’t didn’t touch it. Some of the changes in the other songs were just minor lyric tweaks or whatever. But it just so happened that song, nothing changed.

There’s one song, as you know, that has turned into an anthem for freaks, for performers, singers, and it’s Who Will Love Me As I Am. It’s a song that that has outlived the show on a certain level. Why do you think that song resonates so much with people and did you have any sense in writing it that this would be become the anthem it has?

That lyric came from a really personal place for me. I grew up in the Black Hills of South Dakota. My grandparents were cattle ranchers over the border in Wyoming. Everybody called my father cowboy because he was one. He broke calves in rodeos. In that hyper-macho environment of cattle and cowboys, hunting and sports and cars, I felt like the biggest freak in the world. So when I started working on this show, I just felt right at home. I understood it.

Some people regard the show as a gay metaphor and I’m fine with that because that was really my entry into the world. But I do feel that limits a bigger metaphor than that. If I’ve learned anything doing this, it’s that I think everyone feels like a freak on some level or at some time in their life; certainly adolescence. So that lyric came from such a personal place, and it was one of the first five songs we wrote for the show. Whenever we would play it, people were so moved by it and so I wasn’t surprised.

Did your father live long enough to hear that song and to see the show?

Unfortunately, no. He died just when we started writing it. 

Do you think there’s going to come a time where Side Show will be loved as it is? 

Oh, I think it is that time. They arrived back with the original. It’s just the people’s perception of what it might be like if they haven’t seen it. That’s the issue. Not from people who see it. At least once or twice a month somebody comes up to me, finally having found out that I wrote the book and lyrics and they just go off about how much the show means to them. How much hearing the album when they were in college; how they just couldn’t stop playing it. I can’t think of anything more gratifying for a writer. It’s more gratifying to me than making millions of dollars from a huge commercial hit.

To see the full interview with Bill Russell about Side Show, please go here.

Main Photo: Bill Russell and Henry Krieger at the opening night of the revival of Side Show (Photo courtesy Birdland Jazz Club)

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